I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

Year: 2014

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, Julianne Moore

Run Time: 2 hours 3 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Well, that was unexpected.

No, not that Suzanne Collins' third Hunger Games book, Mockingjay was adapted into a film. That was inevitable, especially after The Hunger Games and Catching Fire nabbed the 7th and 6th highest opening weekends in box office history. Nor was it unexpected that they would split that film into two parts. Twilight and Harry Potter proved beyond all doubt that, despite the format's limitations, it's a surefire box office bonanza. What's unexpected is that Mockingjay - Part 1, an adaptation of the worst half of the worst of the three books, is kind of awesome.

And not just because of the Sexy Lumberjack District.

While the book itself was a bit of a snooze, Mockingjay - Part 1 brings its best elements (namely, the scenes of rebellion) to the forefront and reduces its worst (Katniss's endless emotional outbursts which ring true to a teen girl's responses to a traumatic situation, but murder the pacing in cold blood), both by nature of being a visual, rather than written medium. 

While this is done without any real technical distinction save for a few moments, this turns Mockingjay into an emotional barrage, perfect for capturing the tone of this film's shift in genre from its predecessors. Where The Hunger Games and Catching Fire were bleak and dystopian and child-murdery, they couldn't even hold a birthday candle to Mockingjay, which is nothing more and nothing less than a brutal war film.

So, yeah. This film picks up where the last left off. Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) was busy hungry gaming for the second time when she broke the game's force field and was whisked away to District 13 - a rebel safe haven long thought to have been abandoned. Ousted gamemaker Plutarch Heavensbee (Philip Seymour Hoffman in his final film role) has teamed up with District 13 President Alma Coin (Julianne Moore) to rebrand Katniss as the Mockingjay, a symbol behind which the disparate districts can unite in opposition to the tyrannical Capitol, led by the despotic President Coriolanus Snow (Donald Sutherland).

As Katniss explores the damaged districts with Gale (Liam Hemsworth), she battles her PTSD and harnesses her anger against the Capitol to inspire all of Panem. Although her goals are more singularly focused on the rescue of Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) from the Capitol's clutches, her words ignite the flames of war.

And the fervor of a thousand fanfictions.

As the skirmishes increase and the districts band together against the Capitol Peacekeepers, the film becomes a slamming gauntlet of war and civil unrest. Although it retains the violence-obscuring shaky cam of the earlier films, Mockingjay largely casts away the YA trappings of the franchise to depict a grown-up, mature vision of a reluctant teen crossing into adulthood and finally realizing her responsibility to do all she can to fight the injustices that she has grown up with.

Looking at the news this week, the increased sense of social responsibility present in Mockingjay hits hard. That's all I'm gonna say about that, but this film came at the right time to (albeit slightly accidentally) be bold and shatter political boundaries, much more than it could have even a couple months earlier.

Every element of the film emphasizes the hard facts of war and injustice. Especially notable is the costume design, which actively denies the actresses of their typical level of makeup, stripping away the cinematic facade of normalcy and highlighting the bleak, unpolished reality of the situation. Although Capitol fashionista Effie Trinket (Elizabeth Banks) finds a way to make a military jumpsuit her own, her costume is perhaps the most affecting, transforming a gaudy glamor queen into a pale shadow of her former self.

Though Lord help me, she makes it work.

Behind those simple costumes lies the powerhouse of Mockingjay. Elizabeth Banks outdoes herself as the garish spokeswoman stripped down to her essentials and Jennifer Lawrence gives the single best performance of her career as a shattered teen girl scrabbling for a kernel of hope in a colorless world. The rest of the acting is competent all around (although Natalie Dormer as Cressida the propo director is perhaps a little showy), but these two women really bring the house down, quite literally in some cases.

This visual bleakness is accented in the score with a dazzlingly simple composition by James Newton Howard with lyrics pulled from the book itself - "The Hanging Tree." This song of rebellion spreads like wildfire from district to district, eventually being pulled into the underscore itself in one of the most well-composed sequences in the film.

Luckily, side characters like Banks and Woody Harrelson as Haymitch provide brief moments of levity to protect Mockingjay from becoming a grand tour of humanity's most awful tendencies. I mean, this is a film in which the opening title is led in with the line "I wish we were dead." It's tough to watch - whether it's the bombing or the shooting or the sneak attacks or the ruthless propaganda, there's something to hit everyone's disturbed sweet spot.

I spent a great deal of time dithering over my numerical rating for the film because it's so much better than Catching Fire, but it lacks the intangibles necessary for me to rate it a 9. The visuals just aren't spunky enough for me to look at it as an astounding piece of cinema - although as a series of emotional beatings, it's top notch. So take that 8 with a grain of salt, knowing that I'd give it a half if I could.

See you next year when we can finally lay this franchise to rest with maybe the best entry yet? Until then, may the odds be ever in your favor.

TL;DR: Mockingjay - Part 1 is the best film in the franchise so far - and a harrowing emotional journey.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 989

Reviews In This Series

Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)

Mockingjay - Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)

Mockingjay - Part 2 (Lawrence, 2015)

The Oxford Files

Year: 2014

Director: John Pogue

Cast: Jared Harris, Sam Claflin, Olivia Cooke

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

As my friend Hunter Allen commented on my Xanadu review, I've been having a pretty dreary September. Disappointment after disappointment have abounded, whether it be the squandered potential of As Above, So Below, the meandering non-plot of Love Is Strange, or the repugnantly dull chintziness of the aforementioned experiment in psychological warfare starring Olivia Newton-John.

Now, I wasn't expecting Hammer's revival film after The Woman in Black to be a stellar piece of genre-defining genius, but the fact that it fails to be even halfway decent, barely even stretching itself to a quarter-way decent, boggles the mind. Some would ask why I expected any good output from the man who directed Quarantine 2: Terminal, but I maintain that I like that movie considerably more than its predecessor, a queasy shot-for-shot (except where it counts) remake of my favorite film of all time.

Toss in the fact that The Quiet Ones was kept on the shelf for two full years before its release and I suppose it's easy to see why the film couldn't technically be considered a disappointment - it was destined to be putrid from the very start.

"But movies with gratuitous bathtub scenes always end up so good!" says nobody.

Professor Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris) has several problems, the most damaging of which is that he is a character in The Quiet Ones. But he's also hitting several bumps on the road to disproving ESP and paranormal activity once and for all. His experiment on Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke) - a young woman who is being haunted by a ghostly entity from within - has had its funding pulled by the board at Oxford University. However, he is adamant that he can prove that her haunting is merely a telekinetic expression of mental illness that can be expunged. He insists he will succeed despite his disastrously erroneous assertion that "if you cure one patient, you cure them all."

In addition to spitting on the grave of Sir Francis Bacon, his hobbies include having students do all his work for him and appearing in doorways whenever anybody says something even remotely dramatic. Although he has been forced out of his Oxford location, he brings Jane and a team of student researchers: Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne) - a handsome Irish lad, Krissi (Erin Richards) - a horny blonde who's aiding the experiment on a lark, and Brian (Sam Claflin) - a shy camera operator, to a remote mansion for further assessment.

What ensues is a blisteringly odd mishmash of too-shaky found footage, too-slick 1974 period piece, and the most jaw-droppingly tedious and generic "possession" story ever inflicted upon the public. 

One clichéd example before we move on. In an early sequence - in which footage from a previous case file is played for the students - a young boy (who deserves an Oscar) somehow manages to not burst into hysterical laughter when uttering the most hyperbolically inane moniker for a ghost in recorded history - "The Man That Makes Things Happen."

Ah yes, my old nemesis, The Man Who Teaches Knowledge to Others.

I suppose being generic isn't the worst thing for a movie to be. When two roads diverge in a yellow wood, it's not a sin to take the road more traveled. But when the yellow is as washed out and drab as The Quiet Ones and punctuated by nauseatingly oversaturated swaths of green (we're talking about color palette now, by the way. Don't get lost in the confusing and twisty forest of my metaphor.), it really doesn't seem like a journey worth taking.

The grubby yet tactile colors jar with the slickness of the cinematography itself (every cut and angle and composition is a little too stagey and high definition), occupying a strange, interminably ugly middle ground that pushes you out of the movie with the force of a kangaroo kick.

Some visual examples:

Gross.

Gross.

Gross.

Conflicted.

Characters wander in and out of this repellent world repeating the same conversation over and over until some of them die. It's staunchly unscary, yet overwrought - especially in a too-early shock scene that overextends itself in an attempt to frighten, trips over a snag of internal logic, and tumbles into the rest of the plot, jumbling it into an incoherent mess.

My easiest comparison is the controversial "spider walk" scene in The Exorcist. Those who don't know about it can read about it here if they wish, but let's leave it at this. It's a tremendously creepy scene but it comes too soon in a slow burn narrative and displays powers the demon never uses again, even in the climactic moments. So it was cut out of the theatrical release to ensure the sanctity of the story.

The Quiet Ones leaves all that mess in with relish. To be fair, it's the only even mildly unsettling part of the entire affair, but the damage it does to the third act (which is already busy picking at its own logic with sado-masochistic glee) is irreparable. The whole thing is irritating nonsense, beginning with Sam Claflin living in a barn outside a mansion with presumably dozens of empty rooms, continuing with a doctor carting around incriminating video tapes and a film student suddenly gaining detailed medical knowledge, finally culminating in an explosion of twists that coil onto one another like an out-of-control frozen yogurt machine.

No matter how hard they pretend, there is no meaning to be found in all of this. Just pure agony, boredom, and disappointment. It's a shame to see the legendary Hammer Studios fall on such hard times, but if this is the output we can continue to expect from them, maybe they should return to dormancy.

TL;DR: The Quiet Ones is a pitiable wisp of a horror film - woefully tedious and not scary in the slightest.
Rating: 3/10
Word Count: 985

In District 12, Fire Catch You

Year: 2013

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth

Run Time: 2 hours 26 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Let me tell you something, once Mockingjay - Part 2 comes out (Of course they're splitting it into two parts. Studios always save that trick for the final book with the least plot.) they'd better be ready with that new Harry Potter film otherwise the vacuum of YA cinema will devour us all.

Traditionally the previews before a big hitter film like the second installment of the Hunger Games franchise are gonna be for the superstar blockbuster films. Studios know everyone and their kitchen sink is lining up to see Katniss' further exploits so what better opportunity to get the word out?

Unfortunately the trailers for the upcoming bland YA adaptation Divergent and the Aaron Eckhart vehicle where sexy Frankenstein fights CGI gargoyles (Mary Shelley is currently reanimating herself so she can spin in her grave) would indicate that dark times are ahead of us. But that is the future. For now we have Katniss. We have Peeta and Gale and Finnick and that is not a bad place to be.

No, not at all.

Before we begin let me just say that if you're gonna properly adapt a young adult adventure love triangle novel, you might as well throw in some pretty guys. You know, for the children. It's the least you could do. And the clumsily titled The Hunger Games: Catching Fire certainly delivers with newcomers Sam Claflin and Alan Ritchson as Finnick, the sprightly seafaring Tribute and Gloss, the hard-edged Career Tribute respectively.

I like a man who knows what he's doing with a hunting knife.

And returning cast members Josh Hutcherson and Liam Hemsworth (as Peeta, the baker's boy who's in love with Katniss and Gale, best friend and coal miner who is also in love with Katniss because just dealing with the tyrannical dystopian government isn't enough for one girl) are sporting new jawlines and beefed up frames. Apparently the bull hormones I spiked the Craft Services beverage table with have been doing their job.

Only Liam could make being dragged away by the Thought Police look like a modeling shoot.

Catching Fire begins, as it should, with Katniss (Jennifer Lawrence) alone. The events of the previous Hunger Games have left her shaken, and she is haunted by her memories. She and Peeta, who used a star-crossed lover angle to win last year's games haven't spoken to each other in months. Although they act happy and in love for the cameras, Katniss' developing feelings for her friend Gale stand between them.

When Katniss and Peeta embark on a Victor's Tour of Panem (the dessicated husk of America, divided into 12 districts ruled by the iron fist of The Capitol), President Snow (Donald Sutherland) warns Katniss that she has become a beacon of Hope for the districts. If she does anything to agitate the revolters, she will be summarily punished.

She predictably doesn't do a great job at this, but who cares, Effie Trinkett (Elizabeth Banks) and Caesar Flickerman (Stanley Tucci) have been brought onscreen within twelve seconds of each other and the resulting explosion of color and joy blocked out any other memories of the first half of the film.

I could make a Lady Gaga joke here, but that wouldn't deserve any Applause.

The second half of the film (much like the one before) takes place in the arena of the Hunger Games. For the 75th Annual Games (known as the third Quarter Quell), the contestants will all be chosen from the pool of surviving Victors of past games. That sounds awfully convenient, President Snow... I see what you did there.

So Katniss and Peeta prepare to fight for their lives yet again in an even more dangerous arena with trained and lethal opponents. It is in this segment that Catching Fire begins to cycle through plot points like a Rolodex, but they amazingly retain most of their power even while flying by like leaves in a tornado. The only scene that feels rushed to the point of oblivion is a moment with the elderly Tribute Mags (Lynn Cohen) that leans on the book a little too hard to find its emotional impact.

But all in all, Catching Fire is a definite improvement on the original film. The action sequences in the arena are exhilarating and, thankfully, visible. The ubiquitous shaky cam that haunts The Hunger Games is all but eradicated (save for a few scenes that needed to hide some even shakier CGI), and it doesn't hurt that the contestants are all teenagers and older, so the filmmakers didn't feel the need to obscure the more unsavory elements like killing children behind a wall of blur.

So the cinematography is a marked improvement although it isn't particularly adventurous and the colors in the Capitol training center are afflicted with a bad case of Teal and Orange Disease. The costuming is, as always, top notch, especially regarding the garish frivolity of Capitol attire.

I could spend my entire life posting and reposting pictures of Effie Trinkett.

Then there's the one thing that makes everything worth it. Despite the weird CGI patches, the rushed scenes that try to hit plot point from the book like a pinball, and some truly laughable acid makeup, the sterling foundation that keeps Catching Fire afloat is the impeccable cast.

Jennifer Lawrence is ever reliable as Katniss Everdeen and Liam Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson embody their puppy love characters believably, but the standouts here are veterans of the craft. Stanley Tucci shines yet again as trashy TV host Caesar Flickerman, a one man embodiment of the entire TMZ staff and the shining light of the film is Elizabeth Banks' Effie Trinkett.

Whereas in the first film she was merely a delightful embodiment of the vapid Capitol lack of self awareness, here she is the emotional lynchpin of the film as the cracks begin to show. Watching her break down at the Reaping as she calls Katniss' name while dressed like a swarm of butterflies is absolutely captivating. Who knew Elizabeth Banks could do drama? The casting director of Hunger Games did, apparently, and she steals the show every time she's onscreen.

Public speaking is the worst.

All these ingredients add up to a rather enjoyable popcorn movie for the 99 Percent. It explores the ideas of class disparity and the artificialities of reality TV in an interesting way, as viewed through the lens of a teenager who really didn't mean to get herself into this mess. And although it feels very much like an in-between movie setting up a Grand Finale, it leaves a sweet taste on the tongue and flies by despite its expansive book adaptation run time.

I would also like to mention that there is a shoutout to the That Is Mahogany meme, and the fact that any script writers could be so in touch with their online fan base is refreshing after years of tortuous disappointments. 

Enjoy the film, everyone and may the odds be ever in your favor.

TL;DR: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire is on the whole better than its predecessor and an entertaining successor to the Harry Potter dynasty.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1211

Reviews In This Series

Catching Fire (Lawrence, 2013)

Mockingjay - Part 1 (Lawrence, 2014)

Mockingjay - Part 2 (Lawrence, 2015)